‘Art Director’ is an unhelpful title.
It has nothing to do with Art and very little to do with directing.
Some think it’s about making stuff look cool, I think it’s about communicating at speed.
We work in a medium people are actively trying to ignore, so we can’t hang around.
Art Director’s can only communicate quickly if the understand:
a) Their basic toolkit; photography, film, illustration, editing, cropping, fonts, colours and the rest.
b) The world around them: how humans behave, the meaning of gestures, what’s fashionable, what’s unfashionable, the difference between someone looking excited and crazed, whether to it’s funnier to cast the tall skinny guy or the short fat guy, whether it would be more dramatic to fill the frame with sea and have a thin strip of sky or vice-versa?
I don’t know an Art Director who understands both better than Mark Reddy.